In November, I walked out of one of Sweden's largest IT consultancies after ten years as their lead technician. I had no job lined up. No grand plan. Just a vague sense that if I didn't leave now, I never would. I turn 40 this year, which feels like the kind of milestone that either means something or means nothing, depending on how much you've had to drink.
Three months later, I've applied for jobs ranging from IT management to working on a farm. I've shipped a SaaS product, built a gamification platform, released open source projects, and still can't bring myself to apply for a single developer position. On Friday, I have my first interview since I started looking.
This is not a story about following your dreams. I don't have a neat ending or a lesson to share. I'm writing this because it's honest, and because maybe someone else is staring at their own ten-year mark wondering if it's too late to do something stupid.
It's not. Probably. I'll let you know.
The water that stopped moving
I was good at my job. Twenty-plus certifications across HP, Dell, and Lenovo. I ran the workshop. We handled a ridiculous volume of repairs with a small team, and we did it well. I developed the routines, drove the operational meetings, kept the numbers where they needed to be. On paper, I was exactly where a career is supposed to take you.
The problem with being good at something is that you stop noticing you're doing it. Every day becomes a variation of the day before. Hardware breaks, you fix it, you document it, you move to the next ticket. The work was fine. The company was fine. My colleagues were fine. Everything was aggressively, suffocatingly fine.
I felt like I was treading water. Not drowning - that would at least be interesting. Just... treading. Moving my arms and legs to stay in the same place. Watching the years tick by and realizing that the next ten would look exactly like the last ten, unless I did something about it.
So I quit.
The boss made of gold
Here's the part where I got unreasonably lucky. My manager - and I mean this without exaggeration - is one of the best people I've ever worked for.
Before I made the decision, we had meetings. Not formal performance reviews or disciplinary conversations - just meetings. The kind where you can actually say what you're thinking. I vented about the stagnation, the feeling of going nowhere, the creeping realization that I needed something to change. He listened. Not as a manager protecting company interests, but as a person who'd known me long enough to see past the employee and recognize the human underneath.
He walked a line I didn't fully appreciate at the time - balancing his professional role with something more personal. He had to be the manager, had to consider the business implications, had to do the things managers do. But he also chose to be someone who actually gave a damn about what happened to me after I walked out the door.
When I finally told him I was leaving, he didn't try to guilt me or throw counteroffers at me. He nodded, and then did something I wasn't expecting: he gave me six months of paid leave. Full salary, all benefits, kept my vacation days for 2026. Just... handed me half a year to figure out what comes next, while still technically being employed. The Swedish term is "arbetsbefriad" - freed from work - and it's exactly as surreal as it sounds.
I don't know what I did to deserve that. I worked hard, sure, but so do a lot of people who get shown the door with two weeks notice. Sometimes you just end up working for someone who treats humans like humans. If you have a boss like that, you probably don't appreciate them enough. I didn't, until I was on the receiving end of unexpected kindness.
The job search wilderness
The first month was reflection. The second month was applications. The third month has been... whatever this is.
I've applied for IT specialist roles. Management positions. Infrastructure jobs. I sent an application to work on a farm - actual agriculture, animals and dirt, the works. I've looked at production jobs, manufacturing, things that have nothing to do with computers. When you're not sure what you want, you apply for everything and hope the universe sorts it out.
The interview on Friday is for an IT specialist position. SCCM and Intune - enterprise device management, basically. It's not a bad fit. I've done plenty of adjacent work over the years. The fact that it took three months to get a single interview says more about the job market than about my qualifications, but that doesn't make the waiting any less tedious.
There's one category of jobs I haven't applied for, though. Developer positions. Not a single one.
The imposter who builds things
While not applying for developer jobs, I've been doing developer things. The irony is not lost on me.
Horsemate is my passion project. We have three horses, and managing a stable involves a surprising amount of logistics - training schedules, health records, vaccinations, farrier visits, feeding plans. I got tired of spreadsheets and paper notes, so I built a proper SaaS for it. It's grown beyond our own stable now - other horse owners found it useful, which still surprises me every time i get a notification, telling me someone signed up.
GitHero is my latest side project - gamification for GitHub. XP systems, achievements, leaderboards, embeddable widgets for your README. I wrote about the performance optimization journey recently, and the bugs I've shipped along the way. It's the kind of project where you learn by doing everything wrong first.
Better-IPTV exists because every IPTV client I tried was either ugly, slow, or missing basic features. So I built one in Rust and Tauri. It handles massive playlists without choking, respects privacy by keeping everything local, and does exactly what I need. I debated with myself for weeks before releasing it as open source. Weeks. Over code that was already working, that I was already using daily. The only thing stopping me was the fear that someone would look at it and think it wasn't good enough.
HeadsetStatus is a tiny Linux app that shows my Jabra headset's battery level in the system tray. It exists because I got tired of my headset dying mid-call. 39 kilobytes of code solving a problem that annoyed me daily. Sometimes that's all software needs to be.
There's also TrotBuddy, sitting unreleased on my hard drive and as a private repo on Github - a training assistant for harness racing with ML-powered analysis. It works. I use it. I haven't released it because... well, you know the voice by now.
And it's not just code. Since leaving my job, I've had time for another passion: writing. Specifically, Warhammer 40,000 fan fiction—heavily inspired by Dan Abnett, my favorite author in the genre. But where Abnett brilliantly captures the grim military drama of the setting, I've leaned into the comedic absurdity of Orks. There's something deeply satisfying about writing from the perspective of creatures whose solution to every problem is "more dakka."
Will I ever release a full novel? Probably not. The voice applies here too. But I can offer you a taste—an excerpt from my work-in-progress, featuring a grot named Nibblit learning that survival in Ork society is mostly about not getting kicked. Much.
And yet, when I scroll through job listings and see "Software Developer" or "Full-Stack Engineer," my brain immediately goes: "That's not you. You're not a real developer. You just make things sometimes."
This is, objectively, insane. I know this. It doesn't help.
The voice that says you're not enough
Imposter syndrome is a well-documented phenomenon, which is a fancy way of saying a lot of people feel like frauds and someone wrote papers about it. Knowing the term doesn't make it go away. It just gives you a label for the thing that keeps you from applying to jobs you could probably do.
Here's how it works in my head: I build something. It works. People use it. And then the voice starts: "Why would anyone pay for this? Why would anyone hire you to do this professionally? You're not formally trained. You don't have a computer science degree. Real developers would laugh at your code."
The evidence against this voice is substantial. I've been building software tools since my first tech job, where I created a batch system that cut Windows installation times in half. That was over a decade ago.
At my last job, the company wanted to become more circular - actually sustainable, not just certificates on a wall. The idea was simple: decommissioned computers often have perfectly good RAM, screens, plastic parts. Take them out, store them, reuse them at a discount when something breaks. Good for the environment, good for the budget.
The problem was that nobody had thought about volume. Within months, we had parts everywhere and no idea what we actually had in stock. The project was about to be killed.
So during lunch - eaten at my desk, because that's how I roll - I built a prototype. JSON for data storage, Flask for the backend, basic HTML and CSS for the interface, JavaScript to glue it together. Nothing fancy. Almost embarrassingly simple. But it worked. We tested adding parts, pulling parts, tracking inventory. It worked.
Then I spent time making it not just functional, but actually pleasant to use. The company's cloud division deployed it organization-wide. I added Bootstrap for styling, built a dashboard that ran on an external monitor showing real-time inventory. Admin access through work computers for adding and removing parts.
When I left, four other workshops across Sweden were using my inventory system. A lunch break prototype, built because the alternative was giving up on a project, ended up running across an entire organization.
That's... that's what developers do. Build things that solve problems. Ship them. Watch other people use them. And somehow, I still can't bring myself to put "developer" on a job application.
But the voice doesn't care about evidence. The voice just knows, with absolute certainty, that everyone else is better and that eventually you'll be found out. So instead of applying for developer jobs, I apply for IT management roles and farm work and hope nobody notices the disconnect.
Why I keep building anyway
If I think nobody will use my products, and I'm too afraid to call myself a developer, why do I keep building things?
Honestly? To prove to myself that I can.
Every feature that ships is a small victory against the voice. Every user who signs up is evidence I can point to when the doubt gets loud. Every bug I fix is a reminder that I actually understand this stuff, even when my brain insists I don't.
GitHero exists because I wanted to see if I could build a real product. Not a tutorial project, not a weekend experiment - an actual thing with authentication and databases and payment processing and all the parts that make software real. Turns out I could. The voice says it doesn't count. I'm working on ignoring the voice.
Horsemate exists because someone I care about had a problem, and I knew I could solve it. The satisfaction of building something useful for someone specific - not a hypothetical user, but a real person whose life gets slightly easier because of code you wrote - that's hard to replicate with a job application.
Better-IPTV exists because I needed it, and releasing it as open source was the only way to shut up the weeks of internal debate. The code is out there now. People can see it. Some of them might think it's bad. That's fine. Probably. I'm working on that being fine.
Friday
In a few days, I'll put on something that doesn't have coffee stains on it and try to convince someone to pay me for my skills. Not the developer skills - I'm still not ready for that conversation. The IT skills. The ones I've been honing for fifteen years. The safe ones.
Maybe I'll get the job. Maybe I won't. Either way, I'll come home and probably write some code, because that's what I do now. Build things that nobody asked for, that the voice says nobody wants, that somehow keep attracting users anyway.
Turning 40 is weird. You're supposed to have things figured out by now. Career trajectory, life goals, a clear sense of who you are and what you're doing. I have none of that. What I have is a product with users, a job interview, and the uncomfortable knowledge that the thing holding me back is mostly myself.
Maybe next year I'll apply for a developer job. Maybe I'll finally accept that building software makes you a developer, regardless of what the voice says. Maybe I'll still be treading water, just in a different pond.
For now, I have code to write and an interview to prepare for. One of those things feels more like me than the other. I'll let you guess which.
If you're in a similar place - stuck somewhere comfortable, afraid to try the thing you actually want to do, convinced everyone else knows what they're doing and you're the only one faking it - I don't have advice. I'm figuring this out as I go. But you're not alone in the feeling. That's something, at least. My DMs on X are always open.